Subatomic particles, such as alpha particles and neutrons, regularly bombard the Earth's atmosphere. Such particles can impact electronic devices that include semiconductors. For example, an electronic device may be a flight computer on an aircraft, a Global Positioning System (GPS) device used in a mountain wilderness, or a trip computer in an automobile. These devices typically include semiconductors that may be detrimentally affected by the particles.
For example, a semiconductor, which is used to produce a central processing unit (CPU), may be affected by these particles. The CPU, also known as a processor, manipulates binary information called bits. The manipulation, or processing of binary information includes computations, such as addition or multiplication. During such a computation, particles impacting the processor may flip a bit. For example, a “0” may flip to a “1” and vice versa. Such bit flips cause erroneous results. These erroneous results may be benign, such as a bit flip causing a pixel on a computer display to be a darker than it should appear, or may have more serious consequences, such as a financial computing system calculating the sale of stock incorrectly.
To resolve bit flip problems, previous solutions include using parity checking or Cyclic Redundancy Codes (CRC) to detect or correct errors. In particular, such solutions are applied to data in transit, such as when data travels from one computer to another computer via a network, or data at rest between non-processor components of a computer, such as when data is stored in memory. However, these solutions are insufficient to resolve bit flips that may occur within a processor during computations that occur within the processor.